The Flap About Twitter - SIDNEY EVE MATRIX

It shouldn't be a surprise to hear that Twitter is the fastest growing social networking site on the Internet, expanding astronomically at a rate of close to 1,000 per cent year over year. People are more interested in themselves and each other than in any mass media.

The intoxicating blend of online anonymity and Internet microfame has proved irresistible for about eight million regular tweeters, who are busy discovering, ignoring, following, blocking and retweeting each other.

Twitter lets you shout out 140 characters of micromessage to the world, or at least to whoever is watching the tweetstream at the exact second your two cents blip by. Twitter is a massive social experiment in the dissemination of profound and banal bits: news updates, pet photos, traffic reports, jokes, amber alerts, direct marketing offers, one-sided fragments of conversations, citizen journalism, profanity, random inquiries, self-promotion, truncated hyperlinks and more. Twitter is mashup, misfit media defined. It is the quintessential tool fit for a remix culture.

The Twitter phenomenon, launched three years ago, has tipped from belonging to the subculture of geek hipsters into the mainstream. Third-party developers have flooded the market with widgets and applications, expert consultants will help you be a shining star in the Twitterverse, and e-mail notifications will inform you when your followers are dumping you (how humbling). The emerging Twitter industries are fertile ground for creative types, social media upstarts, PR folks, marketers and designers, and interesting for the rest of us to experiment with.